Faithful Under Fire - Pray with Your Windows Open: Daniel 6

Every one of us has signed up for an overnight stay in the lion’s den. Not as a possibility, but as a certainty. Peter wrote to us as exile people, reminding us that we live in the Lion’s Den - it is the shape of faithful exile in a broken world is the shape of Daniel’s life, just as Daniel’s life had a den in it. The question is not whether the stone will roll shut. The question is whether we will have built the life that can survive the night. “Be sober-minded, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith…” (1 Peter 5:8ff).

Daniel 6 opens with an elderly statesman at the height of his powers in a foreign empire. The Babylonians are gone. Darius the Mede now sits on the throne of the city Nebuchadnezzar built. Daniel has outlasted every regime that threatened him across five chapters. And still he rises each morning, opens his window toward Jerusalem, and prays three times a day — not as performance, not as defiance, but as the daily practice of a man who knows exactly who God is and where home is.

His colleagues search for grounds against him and find nothing. No corruption. No negligence. No error. So they manufacture the grounds: a royal decree that no one may petition any god or man except the king for thirty days. They know Daniel will violate it. They are counting on it. The trap is baited with his own integrity. And when Daniel learns of the decree, he goes home, opens his window toward Jerusalem, and gets down on his knees. As he had done previously.

Sunday’s sermon moved through three postures of prayer that Daniel’s life models — and that form the person who can spend a night in the den and come out the other side.

Pray with your windows open. Jerusalem at this point in the story is rubble. The temple is destroyed. The city is desolate. There is nothing to see in that direction except the ruins of everything the exile has lost. And yet Daniel turns toward it, not because of what is there now, but because of what was there, and what will be there again, and because the God who dwelt in the temple has not been defeated by Babylon any more than the gold statue on the plain of Dura defeated him. Daniel knows he will never see Jerusalem again. He prays for its restoration anyway. He prays beyond his personal chronology, into the plan of God. Our hearts need to have Zion — the kingdom — as their true home. Facing home reminds us who we are, whose we are, and life’s greatest purpose.

“One of the most urgently needed things today is that men and women who know something of Christian leadership should resolve to set aside time to pray, to establish the habit with iron discipline, and then do it.”

D.A. Carson

Pray with your Bible open. Daniel 9 reveals what Daniel was praying in Daniel 6. He opens Jeremiah 29, reads the seventy-year prophecy, and immediately turns it into prayer — taking God at his word and holding him to it, not as presumption but as faith. This is the heart of biblical prayer: praying the promise back to the God who made it. Pray with Paul, pray with Jesus, pray with David and Moses and Jeremiah and John in Revelation. The man who prays the Bible is the man who prays with the grain of reality. He is not asking God to do something random. He is asking God to do what God has already promised.

Pray with your heart open. Daniel is on his knees; he’s not standing, which was the common posture of ancient prayer. Knees signal submission, dependence, the acknowledgment that you are not the one in charge of what happens next. And his prayer combines petition (formal, liturgical, ordered) with plea (the heart poured out, casting itself on a greater for mercy — think Gethsemane). If you are facing the lions, getting on your knees and pouring out your heart is not weakness. It is the most appropriate thing a creature can do in the face of what it cannot control. The prayer of Gethsemane and the prayer of the den are the same prayer: Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.

Then comes the night. The stone rolls shut. Darius cannot sleep. Before dawn, he runs to the den and calls out with an anguished voice: “O Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you serve continually, been able to deliver you from the lions?” The king who signed the death warrant has spent the night in his own kind of den. And from the darkness below, Daniel’s voice comes back: “My God sent his angel and shut the lions’ mouths, and they have not harmed me.”

The Den, the Stone, and the Morning

But Daniel 6 is not merely a story about one man and some lions. It is a story inside a story inside a story. At the deepest level, it is the story of Jesus — arrested in a place of prayer, handed over by reluctant authority, sealed in a tomb with a stone, raised to rule at the right hand of the Sovereign who judged his enemies. Daniel in the den is not an allegory. In the Lion’s Den, he symbolized Judah’s exile inside Babylon itself, a kingdom symbolized by a winged lion. But he is even more than this. He is a type, a historical figure who embodies the shape of the event that will surpass and fulfill it.

Jesus did not merely survive his den. He conquered what the den represents. Daniel walked out of the den unharmed. Jesus walked out of the tomb with the keys of death and Hades in his hand. The lions’ mouths were shut for Daniel by an angel’s intervention. The lion himself — the roaring lion who prowls seeking someone to devour — was defeated at the cross and its end announced by the resurrection.

Early believers like Paul understood exactly which story they were living - the Daniel story. Writing from a Roman prison, facing execution, he reaches back to Daniel 6 deliberately, confessing, “The Lord stood by me and strengthened me… So I was rescued from the lion’s mouth. The Lord will rescue me from every evil deed and bring me safely into his heavenly kingdom. To him be the glory forever and ever. Amen.” - 2 Timothy 4:17–18

“I was rescued from the lion’s mouth.” He is in prison, facing death, and he uses Daniel’s language deliberately. The Lord who stood with Daniel and shut the lions’ mouths has stood with Paul in the imperial court. And then, in the very next breath, Paul uses the language of rescue not from death but through it — bring me safely into his heavenly kingdom — because the last enemy has already been defeated. The one who shut the lions’ mouths in Babylon descended into the very throat of death at Calvary — and came back. He holds the keys. The stone is rolled away and leaning against the garden wall.

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Which brings us back to Daniel at his window. As he had done previously. Those five words are the most important in the chapter. The crisis did not create Daniel’s prayer life. Daniel’s prayer life created and prepared him for the crisis. The heroism of the lions’ den is simply the habit continuing under pressure. The courage to unwaveringly pray the promise back to God in a den of lions did not arrive as emergency provision in the middle of a trial. It grew in him steadily through his whole life, ready to serve him when the day of trial dawned. Daniel is in his eighties in chapter 6. He has been praying with his windows open for over sixty years. The lions never stood a chance.

“… as he had done previously.” — Daniel 6:10

The morning is coming. Open the window now, as you have done previously — and if you have not done it previously, today is where the previously begins.